The Smallest Minority

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

– Ayn Rand

Perhaps the most amazing thing about our so called “evolved” society is its arrogance. Throughout history, this arrogance oscillates from one side of the political spectrum to the other, like a great pendulum suspended from the heavens. The current repository of this arrogance is the left in American politics, the “progressives” and their current delivery system of choice, the Democratic Party.

If you don’t believe me, just have a look on the comment pages of newspapers or the blogosphere and you will quickly realize that the left smugly consider themselves superior to the right and with the re-election of Obama, it has given them an additional reason to pat themselves on the back and tell themselves – and us – just how smart they are.

Arrogance has a symbiotic partner.

That symbiotic entity is conceit.

The conceit of the left is exemplified in their belief that they are the center of the universe, that everything that happens, happens to them, because of them and for them and as such history has no meaning unless it supports them.

Therein lays their Achilles heel. Proverbs Chapter 16, verse 18 says:

Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

History, at least political history, is not linear. It is more like an old 8-track tape, having multiple, separate and distinct tracks but running on an endless loop. Everything old is new again if you wait long enough.

What we are fighting today is no different than what civilized man has fought over ever since we figured out how to cultivate crops and domesticate animals and then turned our attention to trying to control each other as we formed interdependent societies. The conflict as as old as time itself.

As it is certain, on the one hand, that we are all making some similar request to the Government; and as, on the other, it is proved that Government cannot satisfy one party without adding to the labor of the others, until I can obtain another definition of the word Government I feel authorized to give it my own. Who knows but it may obtain the prize? Here it is:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Citizens! In all times, two political systems have been in existence, and each may be maintained by good reasons. According to one of them, Government ought to do much, but then it ought to take much. According to the other, this two-fold activity ought to be little felt. We have to choose between these two systems. But as regards the third system, which partakes of both the others, and which consists in exacting everything from Government, without giving it anything, it is chimerical, absurd, childish, contradictory, and dangerous. Those who parade it, for the sake of the pleasure of accusing all governments of weakness, and thus exposing them to your attacks, are only flattering and deceiving you, while they are deceiving themselves.

For ourselves, we consider that Government is and ought to be nothing whatever but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign.

No doubt Bastiat would recognize the political conflicts ongoing today. He would probably be shocked that we are still on about it.

Can it be so difficult to understand that liberty is an individual trait, that if the individual has no liberty then society has no liberty and that the freedom of a society is measured in the freedom of the individual? Why is it so hard to see that socialism and collectivism is not based on altruism and concern for others, it is based on selfishness, envy and a desire to prevent others from achieving more?

The quality of a society is measured through examining how it treats the smallest minority.

The epitaph of Robert the Bruce, the man who finally freed Scotland, has special meaning today:

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16 thoughts on “The Smallest Minority”

I hope my generation can radically change America where Christianity is shoved behind closed doors, evolution is taught to 5 year old children, secularism is used heavily and a mosque and abortion clinic in every corner.

Hope springs eternal Logan, but I think Texas is right on the money. American culture draws folks from all over the world because it’s a striving, aspirational, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead kind of place. That’s how we roll!

“secularism is used heavily and a mosque………every corner” Guess u must see that having mosque on every corner not in line w/ secularism…..right?

So, let me understand you, if I can; you believe in secularism but you want to pretty much abolish Christianity yet have a mosque on every corner? Are you perhaps suffering from split personality? Why would you want an abortion clinic on every corner? Why not just shoot people who aren’t useful with AK-47s? Why even bother with abortion clinics…besides, if the Federal Government is paying for birth control and the morning after pill, the abortion clinics won’t be needed, will they?

Guys, don’t bother with this fool, he is just engaging in hyperbole to see what kinds of comments he can get. He is trolling, pure and simple. Happens all the time, these morons go on to sites and make outrageous and extreme comments, somebody pushes back and then they jump back and say “Look! I told you they were all crazy!”

Why? We are made of generations of peoples who FLED oppression of the SPIRIT. Not a SLAVE mentality. A striving, reaching for the stars mentality. Willing to leave everything you know, for something that MUST BE better. . .

When things “go south”, and it is, many indoctrinated supporters will awaken, and ask, this wasn’t the “utopia” that was promised, and they will go in search of TRUTH, just like the “tea partiers” of the last 4 years. Unfortunately, they’ll have to hit “bottom” before they choose to open their eyes and minds.

Guess what? I find that I am as much an adherent of Ayn Rand’s as anyone in the room. Only difference is, I carve my share of adheration(?) from her views on reason and religion…

(The Doctrine of Original Sin) declares that (man) ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being/ He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which (the preachers) damn him are reason, morality, creativeness joy – all the cardinal values of his existence.
God, I love this woman!

“The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind.”

Go Girl, tear ’em a new one, Ayn!

“To rest one’s case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer.”

Go on….

“Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.”

Now now Ayn baby, you are starting to repeat yourself. How about your thoughts on God?

“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive- a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence…Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God… Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith….The purpose of man’s life…is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.”

Since ayn’s philosophy of self-interest as a principle derives from her contempt for a supreme being, her animosity towards the idea of morality imposed from above. how dos one justify a belief in a compassionate and giving, charitable and merciful Lord while being a self-centered turd?

and strange that you quote Bastiat. A classic liberal. But I suppose, as I blogged recently, the far right an far left are often closer together then they are to their supposed political parties. Albeit- often arriving there for different reasons, or seeing different paths forward.

But I would posit it has always been the individual that has both led to the need for, and ultimately the failure of, every government and society we as a species have attempted. And it boils down to what you- an ayn rand, propose as the highest of ideals- selfishness/sef-interst. For you can not have that without infringing on the liberty of others- whether due to their weakness or desperation.

Humankind has for ages been trying to rise above the animal kingdom- of which they are a part. To rise above the often brutal- and often unjust, as Darwin put it, survival of the fittest. Or of the most aggresive. the most brutal. The most callous. The most deceitful. The most selfish….

So please elaborate on how the ideals of individual liberty and self-interest coexist? How does the latter avoid trampling on the other- for as John Dnne famously penned “no man is an island” ? How exactly does this apply in a country with a population around 312 million. A nation, as we are reminded daily with wildly varying views, belies, and desires?

Bastiat was a classic liberal, moron, not a communist liberal like you. Buy a dictionary and read John Locke and you won’t appear so stupid.

I reject your implication that capitalism is inherently savage. Free market societies have far outstripped any socialist or Marxist state in the evolution of society. The former provides freedom and opportunity for the individual to explore and grow, the latter forces the individual into rigid conformity.

Read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which was written as the UK took its hard left turn in the post-WWII years. I’m sure you won’t because you are comfortable in your ignorance but if you do, at least you can make a better argument than this one.

These morons would never take time to actually read Bastiat, and consider what he wrote. Then compare to all the countries, including FRANCE to China, etc. and see the failure, DEATH, and DESTRUCTION reaped upon humankind.